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Editorial: Governor, chancellor doing tough work

published Thursday, October 13, 2011

As noted earlier this week on the Banner-Herald’s editorial page, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is close to completing appointments to the Higher Education Finance Commission, a body he created earlier this year by executive order to propose ways of steering state taxpayer dollars to public higher education other than the current formula based simply on an institution’s enrollment.

Even as the governor is moving toward that goal, University System of Georgia Chancellor Hank Huckaby is getting set to release the criteria that he and the system’s board of regents, which oversees the state’s 35 college and university campuses, will use in determining how to consolidate some of those campuses. Those criteria are slated to be released next week, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution report.

What both of those initiatives say is that this state’s top leadership is keenly aware that the University System of Georgia remains a venue of state government where efficiencies might still be found. That is, of course, merely a polite way of saying that the state’s institutions of higher education will probably remain a target for budget cuts for the foreseeable future.

Even recognizing the bad news that state funding for higher education has already dropped by $1 billion over the last few years, and the good news that state tax revenues have been rising for the past few months, the fact that the university system claims a significant portion of state dollars ­— for the current fiscal year, it’s claiming $1.7 billion of an $18 billion state budget — makes it a perennial target for budget reductions.

It’s a target that, unfortunately enough, is made more tempting when state legislators —­ who set the lump sum that goes to the university system but don’t have a say in where the system sends those dollars — choose to see higher education as the proverbial ivory tower for academics rather than an important economic development tool for the state.

Clearly, the potential for research to play a role in establishing new industries, and the fact that the university system is educating the next generation of the state’s work force, represents more than enough reason to see the system as an investment of taxpayer dollars rather than strictly as an expenditure of those dollars.

All that said, it is to be hoped that the governor’s work to change the funding formula for the state’s colleges and universities, and the chancellor’s work to find cost savings through consolidation, isn’t lost on legislators as they consider the system’s funding for the upcoming fiscal year and beyond.

Insofar as the governor and the chancellor are willing to seek out and make tough choices regarding higher education, state lawmakers should resolve to exercise a light touch with the university system’s budget.